By Professor Lindelani Mnguni, Dean of the Faculty of Education, University of Pretoria.
There is perhaps no recent statistic that captures the urgency of South Africa’s education challenge more starkly than this: a 2025 national survey found that only around 30% of learners in Grades 1 to 3 are meeting the reading benchmarks expected for their grade.
This reinforces the most troubling finding from the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), which revealed that 81% of South Africa’s Grade 4 learners could not read for meaning.
Taken together, these figures should be sounding the alarm bells at every level of our society, our educational system, and our planning – roughly seven out of every ten South African children are falling behind in the foundational reading skills they need, and they’re falling behind basically from the moment they start their formal schooling.
Strengthening our education system
Reading is the gateway to learning. A child who cannot read with understanding will struggle in virtually every subject, and difficulties that begin in the early years can follow learners throughout their schooling and limit their opportunities beyond the classroom.
Although there is no single solution to a challenge of this scale, strengthening early literacy interventions – and introducing new ones – would be a good starting point for South Africa. These interventions should support stronger and more appropriate learning materials, effective school leadership, and sustained investment in education.
But the success of these interventions depends on the teachers who bring them into our classrooms.
It is clear that we need more teachers in our classrooms – but numbers alone are not enough. Our teachers must be appropriately qualified, well prepared, and they need to understand how children learn. This will better equip them to recognise when a learner is falling behind and help ensure that they have the skills to intervene in time.
This makes one contradiction particularly difficult to accept: while South Africa has an urgent need for suitably qualified teachers, some graduates who have successfully completed their teaching qualifications face barriers to entering the profession because historical student debt prevents them from accessing their degree certificates.
These graduates have attended the lectures, passed their assessments, completed their teaching practice, and met the academic requirements for their qualifications. Yet, without their degree certificates, they face a barrier to obtaining full registration with the South African Council for Educators (SACE).
Getting more teachers into classrooms
Historical student debt is usually discussed as a higher education funding problem. And it is that, of course. Universities operate in a challenging financial environment and cannot simply disregard outstanding fees. But we also need to see historical student debt through another lens – as a barrier that prevents sorely needed skills from entering the very workplaces where they could in turn help unlock our children’s potential to make a difference.
At the University of Pretoria (UP), one in three graduates who are currently unable to access their degree certificates due to historical debt is a qualified teacher. These are people in whom considerable time, effort, and resources have already been invested. Yet that investment cannot achieve its intended impact if they remain unable to enter the profession.
Graduates who find themselves in this situation may face unemployment and delayed economic independence, while schools and learners lose access to teachers who are already qualified.
As we mark World Teachers’ Day on 5 October, we will rightly celebrate the teachers already doing this work. South African teachers work in extraordinarily varied – and often difficult – circumstances. Many teach in overcrowded classrooms, contend with limited resources, and respond every day to social challenges that inevitably enter the school gates with their learners.
But World Teachers’ Day should also prompt us to think about the teachers we have trained but have not yet managed to get into classrooms. We cannot speak about improving literacy and educational outcomes without examining the barriers that prevent qualified people from entering the teaching profession.
Solving a vexing problem
Addressing historical student debt is complex. The debt cannot simply be written off, nor can universities solve the problem alone. This is a vexing problem that requires collaboration between higher education, government, business, foundations, alumni, and civil society, so we can find targeted solutions that can help more graduates move into employment.
UP’s Degrees Delivered campaign, launched in mid-2026, is one response, helping eligible graduates with historical debt gain access to the degree certificates they have earned. But this issue is bigger than one campaign or one university. We should be asking what more can be done to remove the barriers between qualification and employment.
For teachers, the potential impact is multiplied many times over. Over a career, one teacher can teach hundreds, even thousands, of learners. Therefore, when 81% of our Grade 4 learners cannot read for comprehension, and many children are falling behind even earlier, South Africa cannot afford to leave teaching talent unused.
This World Teachers’ Day, we should celebrate the teachers standing at the front of our classrooms. But we should also ask how many qualified teachers are still waiting outside them – and what it will take to get them through the door.
©Higher Education Media Services.